Mrs Edward Kennard

by J D Bennett

In the 1880s and 1890s it would probably have been dificult to find a member of the reading public who had never heard of Mrs Edward Kennard; now it would be difficult to find one who has. Between 1883 and 1903 she wrote more than thirty novels and volumes of short stories for the circulating libraries of the day. They were mostly sporting novels, with no pretensions to literature, but were 'rattling good tales', racy and jocular, and reviewers liked 'her slapdash, highly ungrammatical style of writing' in which they discerned 'lots of go' and a 'thoroughly healthy tone'.

Mary Eliza Kennard was the second daughter of Samuel Laing, a barrister, an MP and for many years the chairman of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway Company. He was also the first chairman of the Crystal Palace Company, which was responsible for moving the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham; and it was at Perrymount House, Sydenham that she was born in 1850. While she was growing up, the family lived for a while at Hordle House, on the Hampshire coast near Lymington. Here she was educated by governesses, who regarded her as a dunce, and in 1865 she was sent to a private school at St Germain, on the outskirts of Paris.

In April 1870, soon after her return to England, Mary Laing was married at Brighton, where her father also had a house, to Edward Kennard, a deputy-lieutenant and magistrate for Northamptonshire and Monmouthshire. Edward Kennard, who had travelled widely before his marriage, and had been in America during the Civil War, had returned to England on the death of his father earlier that year. He was a contributor to the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, as well as being an accomplished amateur artist and photographer. The Kennards lived in Brighton and London until the purchase of Talbot House at Clack Hill, Little Bowden, from the Earl of Shrewsbury. The house, which had been built as a hunting box, was renamed 'The Barn'.

In 1892 a journalist named Helen Black visited The Barn to interview Mrs Kennard for the Lady's Pictorial. It was, she wrote, 'a substantial, comfortable-looking red-brick house, with sloping roof, tall gable over the entrance-hall, and sides picturesquely covered with ivy', and 'stands back between two fields of ridge and furrow in the main road from Kettering to Market Harborough'.

Miss Black went on to describe its mistress: 'She is above the middle height, and her slight, well-built figure shows to as much advantage in the neatly-fitting brown homespun costume as it does in her well-cut [riding] habit. She has a small head... with dark hair curling over her brow, and dark eyes which, owing to her being short-sighted, have somewhat of a searching expression as she looks at you, and the kindest of smiles'.

Mary Kennard had two sons, and had begun by writing short stories to amuse them. After the boys went off to school, she took to writing in earnest, beginning with The Right Sort; or, a Romance of the Shires, which was well received when it appeared in 1883. Like many of her future novels it was set against a background of thte hunting field, a world with which she was very familiar - the Kennards hunted with both the Fernie and the Pytchley. After that came a steady stream of titles - Straight as a Die (1885), The Girl in the Brown Habit (1886), A Real Good Thing (1887), A Glorious Gallop (1888), Matron or Maid (1889), That Pretty Little Horse-breaker (1891), Wedded to Sport (1892), The Hunting Girl (1893), and The Catch of the County (1894) - to name but some. There were also several volumes of short stories, including Twilight Tales (1886), which were the ones she had written originally for her sons, Our Friends in the Hunting Field (1889), satirical sketches of easily recognisable characters, and The Plaything of an Hour (1895).

Not all her novels were set exclusively in the hunting field. Several of them had a foreign setting: both Landing a Prize (1889) and Morals of the Midlands (1899) had a background of salmon fishing in Norway, combined in the case of the latter with fox hunting in Leicestershire; A Homburg Beauty (1890) described a steeplechase in Germany; and Tony Larkin, Englishman (1900) was set in colonial Africa as well as the Shires. The nine hole golf course in the grounds of The Barn may have provided the material for The Sorrows of a Golfer's Wife (1896). The fact that one of her own sons was a naval officer possibly inspired A Son of the Fleet (1903). She not only shared her husband's love of fox hunting and salmon fishing, but was also a keen cyclist, and wrote A Guide Book for Lady Cyclists (1896), as well as a novel which managed to combine golfing and cycling, The Golf Lunatic and his Cycling Wife (1902).

Her novels were very popular and widely read, and most of them went through several editions, earning their author a considerable amount of money; but deteriorating eyesight, coupled with a bad fall when out hunting, resulting in concussion of the brain, forced her to reduce her working hours, and ultimately brought her writing career to an end.

Her entry in Who's Who also referred to her as 'an enthusiastic automobolist'. She described herself as 'driving a 40 hp Napier car, a De Dion voiturette, and a 15 hp Darracq and riding a motor tricycle, being one of the few ladies in England at present [1900] to do so'. In 1902 she published a novel reflecting this new interest, called The Motor Maniac. She also shared this enthusiasm with her husband: in 1899 Edward Kennard became the first man in Market Harborough to own a motor car, and the following year took part in a 1,000 mile trial run from London to Edinburgh and back, passing through Harborough twice. Less happily, in 1909 he was fined £25 and had his licence suspended for three months, for dangerous driving on Gallow Hill.

In July 1910, whil staying at Freilburg in Germany, Edward Kennard died; he was 68. His widow continued to live at The Barn till after the end of the First World War. After her departure the house was demolished, and Shewsbury Avenue now occupies the site. Mary Kennard subsequently went to live at Leamington Spa where, long since forgotten by the reading public, she died in a nursing home on 3 March 1936 at the age of 86.

First printed in The Harborough Historian

With thanks to Mr Bennett and the Market Harborough Historical Society